


Reichenbach

by dirtybinary



Series: Murder Burgers [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Epistolary, M/M, background Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-11-27
Packaged: 2018-05-03 14:51:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5295473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirtybinary/pseuds/dirtybinary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>I could post this to you and you’d get it tomorrow—did you know the mail service here is really, frighteningly efficient?—but I decided on the intimacy of slipping through your motel’s tepid security and pushing this letter under the door myself. This way, you’ll know that my fingers have brushed the grubby carpet in the seam between door and floor; that my feet have lingered on the threshold of your room and will again, whenever you choose to invite them.</i> </p><p>Love letters and/or hate mail between an ex-assassin and his sometime nemesis, sometime lover.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reichenbach

**Author's Note:**

  * For [obsessivereader](https://archiveofourown.org/users/obsessivereader/gifts).



> This is part of an AU in which Steve didn't go into the ice, but spent the better part of the twentieth century searching for and thwarting the Winter Soldier. It's probably best to read [Time to Kill](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5080849) first.
> 
> Here lie discussions of Alzheimer's disease, depersonalization/derealization and suicide, so if that's likely to trigger you, do give this one a miss!

  
_A hunter is someone who listens._  
_So hard to his prey it pulls the weapon._  
_Out of his hand and impales._  
_Itself._  
The Life of Towns, Anne Carson

**i.**

Dec 2, 2014 

Buck,

It was a mistake to run.

By which I mean it was completely unnecessary. Every time you disappear, I find you. (Usually too late, it’s true, but I have never once _not_ found you, not even when you didn’t want to be found. I think secretly you do, and I think that’s half the fun of running for you.) I could post this to you and you’d get it tomorrow—did you know the mail service here is really, frighteningly efficient?—but I decided on the intimacy of slipping through your motel’s tepid security and pushing this letter under the door myself. This way, you’ll know that my fingers have brushed the grubby carpet in the seam between door and floor; that my feet have lingered on the threshold of your room and will again, whenever you choose to invite them.

I am writing this in the stairwell down the hall from your room, squatting on the steps like some kind of fugitive. (I guess technically I am? I never found out if the CIA gave up trying to arrest us or if they’re just pretending to.) There’s a couple of teenagers smoking on the landing above me. I don’t understand what they’re saying but I know they’re scrawny and tattooed and really damn worked up about something, god only knows what. They kind of remind me of us, in that sense. The old us. The us that would climb out onto fire escapes to smoke and talk, not to kill each other.

I’m not making that up. We used to do that in our old tenement on the hottest summer nights. Usually, though, you’d smoke and I’d beg you for a cig but you’d just say I’d get an asthma attack. You were probably right. Back then, you used to be right more often. 

Anyway, I like to think of you peering at this letter in the morning, prodding at it through thick leather gloves and scowling behind that godawful mask of yours. No contact poisons, don’t worry. No microscopic trackers either, so if you’re feeling sentimental, you don’t actually need to throw this away once you’ve read it. I’ve drawn a caricature of what I think your face looks like as you read this and have enclosed a copy for your personal edification. It’s really quite cute.

You’ll be wondering how I found you. I know what you’re thinking. Quit blaming everything on Nat and give me some credit for once, will you? I know you better than anyone, living or dead. I can follow a trail of breadcrumbs, especially when it looks like the big bad wolf left them on purpose to lure me somewhere. And as far as holiday destinations go, this ain’t too bad. Reasonably HYDRA-free and hot as the mouth of hell itself, and more types of greasy takeout than I can name. I can even put up with the constant sunburn. I mean, you could have picked Helsinki or somewhere and I would still have followed you, because that’s my _job_ , but I’m pretty grateful you used your two brain cells and didn’t.

(Please don’t take this as a suggestion and head to Helsinki next. It’s December and you have a metal arm, Buck.)

You’ll also be wondering if I’m alone. I am. It’s only fair. Nat’s on her great journey of self-discovery—you’ll have heard from her already—and I said goodbye to Sam when he dropped me off at L.A.X.; he’s gone back to his asshole cockatiel and his non-pulpy OJ and his slow-motion flails around the Mall. I miss “running” with him already, even though it wasn’t much of a challenge. When you get tired of emoting at the four walls of your hotel room, we ought to go for a run together. Maybe a crazy long biathlon. Maybe we could race all round the city, like Alexander and Hephaestion at the walls of Troia.

Which is to say, in case there was ever any doubt: I would chase you to the ends of the earth and back, which is possibly the only truth that hasn’t altered in the last ninety years or so. Maybe more, if you believe in reincarnation. I’m starting to. 

I have enclosed:

  * one (1) caricature; see description above
  * one (1) automobile repair invoice, payable to Wilson, S.
  * two hundred dollars ($200), courtesy of Romanoff, N., so you may buy yourself “a proper pair of sunglasses” to replace the goggles she broke, because “you’re in the middle of the tropics and your pasty face will need it”.
  * two (2) ebi rice burgers from the joint across the street, which sadly do not fit under the door and are therefore waiting in the hallway. They should still be hot when you find this, to prove I am only as far behind you as I choose to be.



Try not to kill anyone, Buck. I don’t think I could fight you again. 

Steve

 

 

**ii.**

Dec 3, 2014

Buck,

Well, the food is gone, so I’m just going to convince myself that you ate it before the motel staff threw it out. It was good, wasn’t it? I wonder if there are any Mos Burgers back home. 

“Home”. Huh. I keep saying that without knowing what it means. Peggy would tell me to define my terms. Every time I try, I end up thinking of that fire escape in our old building. Of sitting in the hot night with my bare feet dangling over the stair rail and your second-hand smoke in my lungs. Along with other, less savory smells. Brooklyn really did stink in the ‘30s. So did you. (I kid, I kid. You smelled of starch and cologne on date nights and ketchup and kitchen grease after work—  ~~do you remember that diner~~ you made a pretty decent living flipping burgers in a diner, and you always snuck home leftovers for me and Becca. I was the one who stank of drugs and smelling salts and, well, death, I guess.) 

Peggy and I have moved nineteen times since we got married. Brooklyn (too painful). London (too rainy). Paris (with Dernier, until his in-laws moved in and kicked us out). Kiev (undercover, looking for you). Once, for three miserable months, New Jersey (DON’T ASK). And so on. Home was never a house or a city for us, just the steadfast presence of each other, her pistol cocked over my shoulder, my shield raised above our heads. I barely even remember half the places we lived in. So I dunno what I mean, really. Maybe home’s just one of those concepts you stop believing in after a while, like Santa Claus et al.

I just think there should be rice burgers sold everywhere, okay. 

I’ve “enclosed” a couple more for you. These are yakiniku, which I’m told is a kind of beef. You won’t even care what it is after the second bite because it’s too good. Also fries, and corn soup, and iced milk tea. I know you’re fully capable of getting your own meals, but sometimes you forget and there was that one time in Jakarta when you fainted while you were trying to garrote me and it was really awkward. Totally killed the mood and all. So just humour me and eat it, or at least pretend to, okay?

~~I’ll continue to stay out of your way but if you ever want to~~

Take care.

Steve

 

 

 **iii.**  

Dec 4, 2014

Buck, 

Do you even read these things? I’m sure you do. You were always a curious fella, and no matter how little you care, there’s no way you’ll ignore sackfuls of food randomly materializing at your door without at least trying to figure out where they came from. Every time I go to my favourite stairwell I check for booby traps, but there are never any. I won’t lie, it’s kinda disappointing. After a century or so, a man gets used to little luxuries here and there, like being bloodily thwarted by his best guy whenever he tries to do, well, anything.

I know you’re still alive, though. I’m great friends with the guys smoking up on the next landing now (apparently they come out here every night because you can’t smoke in the rooms, you’ll get fined) and they told me they saw you leaving the motel this morning, looking perfectly touristy in your bermuda shorts and ugly sandals. See the attached Post-It for an artist’s impression of what that must have looked like. I’m sure it was even more cute and stupid than I managed to capture, but give me a break, I’m drawing with a shitty ballpoint pen on a stack of papers balanced on my knee.

Why do they only make supersoldiers and not superartists, or superdoctors, or superengineers? Think how cool that would be.

I’ve thought all day about what I want to write to you next. You haven’t confronted me or run away, so I’m guessing you don’t feel particularly threatened by my presence or my letters. (If you do, you can just throw them away unread. I wouldn’t know either way.) You never want to talk about anything ~~from before~~ pre-1950s, but I know your memory or lack thereof always frustrated you more than you would admit. So I thought I’d try and fill in some of the blanks for you. How about the day I found out you were still alive?

(Really, you can stop reading here if it bothers you. I’ll paste the Post-It over this section so your big dumb face will cover it.)

It was April of '56. Peg and I were renting one of Howard’s Manhattan apartments at the time—he was working on nuclear stuff, as you probably know, and we wanted to be closer to his lab in case he blew himself and/or the world up or something along such lines. Peg was working late, and I was at home, conjugating German verbs and trying not to burn dinner (lasagna with caramel corn for dessert; I still remember it perfectly), both of which are a lot harder than they sound when you do them simultaneously. I’d just gotten around to wondering whether all that smoke was normal when Angie called, all “hi handsome you need to get to the hospital asap, Peg’s been shot no of course it’s nothing serious, stop wheezing like that and get moving, she’s demanding to see you _right this moment_.” So I went.

I’d probably broken every single traffic law in existence by the time I got there, but she _was_ fine. A bullet had grazed her shoulder, and she had a bunch more cuts and bruises, but she was already up and about, pacing the ward and yelling into phones and giving all the nurses fits. I think one of them was threatening to tie her to a wheelchair. She’d been attacked while walking to her car—she had a chauffeur but it was almost eleven and she’d sent him home hours ago—and the assassin had fired at her, but she’d shoved him off the sidewalk and under the wheels of a passing truck. She’d even driven herself to the hospital after. She told me all of this in about seven seconds, making it sound very quotidian, like stopping by the store on the way home to get some lettuce or something. It wasn’t the assassination attempt she wanted to talk about, but the assassin.

I don’t exactly remember what she said. Something like, “Steve, I saw his face,” and then some other stuff while the nurses swarmed around trying to make her sit still long enough that they could inject a painkiller, and then, “Steve, are you going to cry?”

(I’m lying. I remember. I don’t want to write it down and I don’t want you to have to read it.)

(I didn’t cry. I’ve cried only twice since ’45, once at the altar when I said “I do” and once when I watched _Titanic._ ) 

She told me later that the worst part wasn’t being shot at by you, or having to fight you. It was seeing you get up from under the truck before the driver could so much as stop, and watching you stagger away like you’d only tripped on the stairs or something. She was the first to work out that they’d done something to you, something we ought to have noticed from the start, and that they must have found you again. That they now had you.

It was the next year that we moved to Kiev.

Peg dyed her hair blonde. I grew a beard. We made a handsome couple, and we only got made twice, which might be a record for me. We didn’t find you, though, not until you rappelled into our apartment through the kitchen window one night, tried to blow us up, and then ate every single thing in our fridge while we were knocked out from the blast. That was when I figured out you were (a) still a little shit and (b) starving. But that’s a story for another time.

I’m sorry. You probably didn’t want to read all that.

Anyway, in case you’re still hungry, here are some more rice burgers. I don’t even know what they put in these this time, but they’re good. I’d leave some of the green apple ice cream I had from McD’s this evening, but I’m not sure when you’ll be back from your little bermuda-shorted excursion, and I don’t want you to come back to a pile of sludge. 

Yours,

Steve

 

 

**iv.**

12/06/14 

Steve—

Don’t be so melodramatic. It’s really quite unbecoming.

Here is something to bear in mind. I have never, not once, run away because I was afraid you would catch up. I’m not programmed that way. I mean that in the metaphorical sense and also in the people-fucking-with-my-brain sense. So you can go on skulking up and down my hallway all you like. Better yet, break down the door and we can fight to the death with napkins and straws and these dumb little plastic forks you keep putting in your care packages even though I wouldn’t conceivably use them to eat a burger. It’d be fun at the very least.

What I mean to say is, I’m not running. I’m just taking a leisurely jog around the world, same as Natasha. After all the shit that went down in D.C., I think I’m more than entitled to a mid-life crisis and some time alone to think. Maybe I’ll stay here a while. Maybe I’ll steal a life saver from the hotel pool and paddle it to Malaysia. Maybe I’ll rent a car and just start driving, see how far I can get. Think I can cross Asia and Europe and get to, say, Lisbon or something? It’s probably in excess of 20,000 km and I might have to dismantle the car and float it across a strait or two, but hey, I’ve nothing but time on my hands.

Or maybe I’ll rob a bank. Become a pirate. Kill some people. I dunno. I’ve still got a crapload of ammo and nothing better to do.

I’m just fucking with you. Maybe. 

(FYI in case you assemble the Avengers or sic Tasha on me or something, I haven’t killed anyone since I got here. Well, except the guy on Tuesday but he was an ex-colleague of mine who was spying on you spying on me. I doubt you’ll mind.)

Thanks for the stuff. The food and the memory. I remember that incident perfectly fine, by the way. Or I don’t, but I have access to my entire mission back-catalogue courtesy of Tash’s datadump and I can piece the facts together from there. I think that was my first real mission, assassinating the erstwhile Director Carter. They wanted to see if I’d really do it. In any case, she broke all my ribs with a speeding 8-wheeler before I could so much as pull out a knife, so it transpired to be a purely academic question.

First a train, then a truck. Jesus. Like husband, like wife.

And anyway, your dumb drawing is far more traumatic to look at than the memory of being half killed by a hurricane in a red hat. My eyebrows do NOT look like that, and you are horrible at drawing hair. 

I thought of leaving this in the stairwell for you to find, but your fellow delinquents will probably get to it before you do. Besides, I wanted to prove that you’re not the only one who can track people down with creepy accuracy. I found your hotel (not nearly as nice as mine) and I’m gonna shove this through your window when you’re out mowing down innocent joggers tomorrow morning.

Enclosed:

  * one (1) steering wheel for Wilson, S.
  * three (3) pairs of sunglasses for Romanova, N.
  * your $200, which ought to buy you enough sunblock to last a lifetime. Even a lifetime as unnaturally long as ours. I’m looking at CCTV footage from your hotel lobby right now and that shade of red, however interesting, really doesn’t look good on you.



Try not to get yourself killed. Better yet, go invade a small country with your terrifying wife and leave me alone.

B

P.S. Why Alexander & Hephaestion, when we could do Holmes & Moriarty and tumble into a waterfall together? Oh wait, we kind of did, only you took your turn a few decades late. 

P.P.S. I stuck your stupid drawing on my rifle. If I miss my next shot it’s your fault.

P.P.P.S. ??? Fainting in Jakarta? Don’t remember. What.

 

 

 **v.**  

Dec 7, 2014 

Buck,

Wilson, S. and Romanoff, N. thank you for the generous presents. Wilson, S., however, exhorts me to ask you what he is supposed to do with the steering wheel and how the hell you think cars work anyway. (It’s okay. He got a new one with the insurance money. It flies.)

You don’t need to prove anything to me. In any case, I see you found my hotel room just fine. As evidenced by the fact that I got your letter, and by the tripwire stretched across the landing strip just inside my room. I managed not to fall on my face, but I did set off the six (6) gongs and seventeen (17) windchimes you rigged on it while trying to take it down, thoroughly scaring some stray dog and calling upon myself the wrath of hotel management at 6.30 am. They thought I was drunk (I wish) and gave me a lot of stern, disapproving, young-people-these-days looks. Thanks, Buck. Watch your back.

For the last time, just so we can have it in writing, I did not throw you off the train. You got your ass blasted out the carriage like the dumbfuck you are. I tell you this at least once a year and I’m beginning to think you haven’t forgotten, you just like watching me squirm. Whatever. I gave up trying to convince you sometime in the 70s, especially since sometimes, I’m not even sure myself what happened that day. I dream about it so often that it’s become difficult to tell memory from nightmare. Maybe I _did_ push you, and I convinced myself that you fell because I couldn’t face what I’d done, and all this time you were perfectly right to hate me. Maybe you’d be right to hate me either way.

Come to think of it, if you’re an amnesiac and I’m delusional, how will we ever find out what really happened?

Peg and I talk on the phone every night. She’s in a nursing home now, I don’t know if I’ve told you. I asked her yesterday if she remembered that run-in with you in 1956, and she did, down to the weather and what she was wearing. (Red hat, yes.) I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s how Alzheimer’s works, after all. You lose the recent stuff first. It starts with the little things, like where you put your reading glasses or whether you’ve had breakfast or why your husband is on the news again (hint: it’s because he and his arch-nemesis wrecked half of D.C. between them). Then it progresses to bigger things. The names of your brother’s grandchildren. Words for places and feelings. The fact that the organization you built from the ground up with your bare hands was rotten from its very inception. (Re. that last one, I think it’s not that she can’t remember but that she doesn’t want to.) But the distant past stays intact, because the bedrock doesn’t erode even when all the topsoil is washed away. 

She still remembers how to load a gun, too. She can name every face in our collection of wartime photos, from Col. Phillips right down to the humblest Private in the 107th, even though she sometimes mixes up Sharon and Sylvia and she can never tell apart the latest batch of Howlie grandkids. (Honestly, I can’t either. All sixteen of them are named James or Jaime or Jamie.) One time the fire alarm in the nursing home went off and she thought she was back in London during the Blitz, and started mobilizing the nurses and rattling off coordinates to the nearest air raid shelter. Sometimes she’ll ask why Howard hasn’t come to see her, or remind me to buy tickets to Angie’s next show (she hasn’t performed in decades), or nag me to keep you on my six when I go out on missions. I guess she can’t get it into her head that you’re trying to kill me any more than I can. 

~~I worry about her so much. I dread that one day she’ll forget me too~~

She’s been pretty lucid lately. She knows what I’m doing here on the other side of the world and keeps asking me for news of you. So telling me to run home to her isn’t going to work. She’d just send me back here to you. ~~We’ve been looking for you for half our lives and I don’t think she’ll go in peace until I bring y~~

I’ll tell you about Jakarta in my next letter. I’m kind of tired now. 

Love,

Steve

P.S. Take me to the Reichenbach and I will gladly tumble over with you, if that’s what you want. Seems like a waste though.

P.P.S. Driving across the world sounds ridiculous. Dangerous, possibly illegal, probably impossible. Ergo totally amazing. I know, I know, you weren’t inviting me.

 

 

 **vi.**  

To: Sam Wilson <swilson@avengers.com>  
From: Steve Rogers <steeb@avengers.com>  
Subject: RE: CAR PICS OMG  
Time: 08 Dec 2014 03:14 A.M.

Hey Sam, 

Congrats on the flying car AND the new @avengers address. You’re one of us now. Is this e-mail the first to ever grace your inbox? I hope it is. 

Caught up with B, if only in the most literal sense. I mean, I’ve not actually spoken to him, but we’re staying on the same street and we haven’t tried to kill each other yet. I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say that’s a good sign. 

I’m not sure this is exactly your area of expertise, but well. I gotta ask. Is it possible for someone to concoct and live in a false version of reality for decades while being more or less functional in the real world? So not a complete psychotic break. More that they exist in a slightly different alternate universe where just one or two small things are different. Like, they did something wrong that they can’t get over, so they make up a world where they didn’t do the thing. Extreme escapism and all that. 

It’s really late and I don’t think I’m making much sense, so feel free to ignore this and continue spamming me with pics of your car. With you in it this time, please. Looking forward to all the joyrides you’re gonna give me when I get home.

Steve

P.S. Before you ask about my username, which EVERYONE does, I’ll just say that it’s an inside joke directed at certain flying car engineers who couldn’t pronounce my name when they were two years old and could only call me Uncle Steeb, thereby forming a habit that stuck until they went to college at the ripe and very mature age of fourteen. They won’t admit it but you heard it here first, from me, the most reliable of sources. I _could_ use my big boy @shield.gov address but obviously I haven’t logged into it since the Incident.

 

**vii.**

To: Steve Rogers <steeb@avengers.com>  
From: Sam Wilson <swilson@avengers.com>  
Subject: RE: RE: CAR PICS OMG  
Time: 08 Dec 2014 07:22 A.M. 

Steve-o,

Okay so it’s not that Nat reads other people’s personal e-mails or anything, it’s just that she happened to be in the passenger seat while I was flying this thing and thus, in the interest of responsible driving, helpfully volunteered to type this reply for me.

So hi, fossil. It’s me.

Sam thought long and hard about how to answer your question. You know he’s not a neuroscientist or a psychiatrist or anything, just a guy with a counselling cert and years of experience dealing with certain types of fuckupery. His long answer involved a lot of _it’s not your fault_ s and _of course you didn’t throw him off the train_ s and his short answer was a big resounding NO with caveats that don’t apply to you. So I hope that clears some things up. I can cite the relevant scholarly articles if you really, really want, but don’t expect APA referencing.

Anyway, I took the liberty of digging through your mission records. Mostly boring stuff, but here’s something interesting: in Feb 1968, you were assailed by the Winter Soldier in Chicago while doing something inexplicable and no doubt stupidly brave at the top of an elevator shaft. It was a close fight and, in order to save yourself and the team of civilian engineers with you, you were forced to push the Soldier down the shaft, whereupon he was not heard from for another three years.

Doubtlessly, you remember the circumstances better than I could describe them to you. I’m just going to suggest that if either you or James thinks he was pushed out of the train, one or both of you may be getting your 1945 Swiss Alps memories muddled up with your 1968 Chicago ones. I know he’s the amnesiac, but Steve, you’ve lived nearly a century. You’ve been through a hell of a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if your memories and/or the attached emotions got mixed up somewhere.

…Or I could just be bullshitting. I don't know. But I went over this stuff with the SHIELD psychologists back when I jumped ship, so I thought I’d share.

And if you did push James anywhere, I’m sure he deserved it, and you can tell him I said so.

xoxo

Nat

P.S. NICK GOT ME A PET SNAKE OMFG SEE ATTACHED PICS

P.P.S IT’S A BALL PYTHON

 

 

**viii.**

Dec 9, 2014

Hey Buck,

Okay, here’s the Jakarta story. Sorry about that last letter. If you haven’t opened it, throw it away; and if you’ve read it already, just ignore me. I was really tired and it was a weird day and everything was just wrong.

So this was in the '60s. I’m not sure which year exactly but Nat’s just reminded me that my entire military/SHIELD record is now available online, same as yours, so I’m sure you could look it up if you really wanted. Your employers were instigating riots and bombings across the country (for reasons I found utterly incomprehensible at the time, since I didn’t know they were HYDRA yet and you, dirty little genius, somehow managed to keep it from me). I’d spent a month tracking you around in circles in the jungles of Borneo, and my whole STRIKE team was dead or missing or dying from dengue. I was pissed off as all hell, and still kind of in denial that you were the Winter Soldier. I thought maybe they’d managed to clone you, or they’d stolen one of Howard’s prototype hologram masks and programmed it to show me your face just to fuck with me. You gotta admit that’s exactly the type of thing they’d do.

Anyway, long story short, it _was_ you. I made you in a busy shopping mall and tracked you to the roof of a warehouse, where you were setting up your rifle for some ridiculous long-distance shot to kill a government official. Or maybe it was an engineer or a colonel, I’m not even sure anymore. As a mutual friend recently pointed out to me, 96 years is a lot of memory to keep straight. You looked like you hadn’t eaten in a year: your clothes were so loose they might as well have been flapping from a laundry line, and your skin was burning with fever, and you called me Richard (I think that was the name on my visa and your handler didn’t know any better). I didn’t want to fight you. ~~I was so tired, I wanted to just lie down and let you shoot me~~

Well, we fought. The specifics escape me right now. They won’t interest you, anyway. One moment you had a wire around my throat; the next moment you just sort of keeled over and I called for evac and bailed. I wanted so badly to take you with me, but your backup was on its way, and by then I’d lost so much blood that I was seeing four of everything. I pretty much felt the way I did the time I was thirteen and coughed so bad I cracked a rib—dazed and exhausted and full of resentment for the whole world and v. v. fucking done.

Confession #1: I kicked you really hard in the head while you were passed out, because I was afraid your handlers would think you were feigning unconsciousness to let me get away. (And also because I was mad at you.)

Confession #2: I failed my psych eval after that mission and got benched for the better part of a year. Peggy and I still don’t talk about it.

I’m not sure why you even asked about this. You could have pieced it together from the records yourself. Hell, you probably already have. But in the off chance that you’re wondering why we always wound up eating whenever we ran into each other on the job, that’s why. Because you don’t get fed enough and because low blood sugar makes me weird. 

On that note, I’m enclosing:

  * A 4.2 kg jar of jelly beans from Candy Empire because, well, why the hell not. Did you know you could buy so many jelly beans in one go? I sure didn’t. Fair warning: I kind of stress-ate my way through all the good ones last night and now only the weird-ass flavours are left. Beware the speckled red ones.
  * Five (5) [whale-shaped utility knives](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com/post/127769078035/ktsaurusr3x-laughingsquid-high-carbon-steel). Please don’t take this as encouragement. I was shopping and I just thought they were cute.
  * The damn $200. Just take it already. 



Write back if you want. You know where to find me. 

Yours,

Steve

 

 

 **ix.**  

To: Sam Wilson <swilson@avengers.com>  
From: Steve Rogers <steeb@avengers.com>  
Subject: RE: RE: RE: CAR PICS OMG  
Time: 09 Dec 2014 11:02 P.M. 

Sam, or Nat, or whoever the hell is reading over Sam’s shoulder this time,

Thanks. That makes a lot more sense than what I was thinking. I promise I don’t spend all my time brooding on things like that. It’s a long story. He told me he remembered fighting Peggy back in ’56, and that it was his first real mission, and it just got me thinking about what that meant. Why it took so long for him to take the field. What they were doing to him between ’45 and ’56, while I was busy getting married and looking at houses and having people make up new medals just so they could pin them on me. Eleven years is 4,015 days. 96,360 hours. 5,785,436.4 minutes. Did it take them that long to break him?

Put that way, we should actually be proud of him. I know I am. 

But anyway.

I’m fine now. Skyped with Peg and Sharon. Went shopping (there are like seven malls within walking distance of my hotel, and yes, I’m aware my idea of “walking distance” differs significantly from the norm but that seems like a lot even to me) and bought a ton of candy and other weird stuff. Am chock full of more types of chocolate than I ever knew existed. Am also very, very sunburnt just from walking down the street. But apart from that. Totally fine. And I’m talking about my Feelings, so you can’t say I’m not coping.

I don’t know if he’ll write back. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go to the motel and find he’s checked out and vanished into thin air. I don’t know if I have the stamina to keep going after him, but it’s my life. If I stopped fighting/chasing/thwarting him, I don’t know what I’d do instead.

So, yeah.

@Nat, if you’re reading this, the snake is adorable even if it does clash horribly with your hair. What are you naming it? And you didn’t tell me you were vacationing with Sam, you little shits.

Steve

 

 

**x.**

12/10/14 

Steve,

Yeah. Natalia sent me photos of the car, and her ball python, which she tells me she has named Therapy Snake. Question: how is a flying car even remotely practical when one owns a jetpack with wings? Further question: why are all your friends so weird? Don’t answer that.

I’m sorry about Peggy. I didn’t know it was so bad. Time doesn’t work for people like us, and sometimes I forget that a whole century has passed for her, that she never got the serum. Seems unfair, when they wasted it by the gallon on HYDRA trash and unwilling lab rats. But I’m glad you married her, that you had each other’s back all these long years. I’m sorry she’s ill. I’m sorry she got old and you didn’t.

I think I would be sorry about a lot more things if I could only remember them.

I’m writing this in a place that can’t decide if it’s a bar or a bistro or a regular restaurant, and it put a strange picture in my head. In it I’m sitting at a counter, downing glass after glass of straight vodka, or maybe it was whisky, I dunno. Strong stuff, anyway. I’m definitely drinking more than I should, and I haven’t even bothered to put my uniform on right, but I’m not drunk and no one’s giving me shit for breaking dress code. No one’s even _looking_ at me, and it’s like I’m not even physically there, like my real body died and I’m just walking fog. It scares me, and I want to wreck things like an angry ghost, to throw my glass at the wall or maybe at you, but I can’t make myself do even that.

~~If a gun goes off in space, does it make a sound? If a man is dead to the world, is he alive at all?~~

And then I look around and there she is, red dress and red lipstick, lethal as a stiletto. You’re there, too. So flawless in your tidy new Army uniform, glittering with all your badges. You look a bit like a pin-up, except no pin-up was ever so wholesome. You’re the smell of something distant and fleeting and maybe already gone, the bitter metal tang of rain and the end of a thunderstorm. There’s a word for it I’m forgetting right now. And seeing you and her together, it was like one of our mad scientists had fucked with the Earth’s magnetic field, like gravity was upended and the tides had changed and everything was flowing uphill to you. You and Peg, you didn’t just turn all heads. You were a tangible force, the sort of thing that drives soldiers to run into battle with other people’s names on their lips. I could feel you and I couldn’t even feel myself, you know? I could _taste_ you on the air when I couldn’t taste the whisky or vodka or whatever; and I wasn’t even sure I was alive any more, but I knew then that you were immortal. So was Peggy, in her way. Serum or not.

Maybe I just made that memory up. It’s hard to tell sometimes. Or maybe it was Alex and Natashenka, not you and Peg.

Actually, no, I really, really hope I made it up.

Anyway, this is why I had to haul ass after our trip to the Smithsonian. Things always end up like this when we meet. We either beat each other up or talk about sad shit like this and it gets me in trouble with my handlers and you with your shrink friends. Why can’t we just be normal? I could have died a hero’s death in the war and you could have settled down with twelve cats and a dog, but no. I came back to life, and you? You just gotta be weird.

Well, thanks for the stuff. The jelly beans taste funny in coffee but otherwise, they’re really good and I don’t ever want to eat anything else in my entire life. Please send more candy and/or whale knives. I’ve finished the former and I haven’t yet found a use for the latter, but one can never have too many knives.

Enclosed:

  * Well. You’ll see.
  * You can stop trying to give me money now. You have no idea how many offshore bank accounts Alex had and all of them are mine now, since they don’t legally exist and therefore nobody else can try to claim them.



B

P.S. Petrichor. That’s the word I was after. Saw it in a novel. Been reading.

 

 

 **xi.**  

Dec 11, 2014 

Buck,

You think my friends are weird? What conceivable reason is there to put jelly beans in coffee? Or, for that matter, to buy like a thousand dollars’ worth of sketchbooks and coloured markers and god knows what else and stack them up in what I can only describe as an arcane and vaguely phallic monument outside my door? WHY. 

If this is a hint that I should quit chasing you and concentrate on my art—sorry, I can draw just fine while following you around the world. And also, the chambermaids are now convinced I am a menace and possibly involved in gang and/or occult criminal activity, so if I get evicted I’m gonna head right over to your place and crash myself firmly on your couch. I know you don’t want that. 

You didn’t make up that memory. At least, I have it too, so either neither of us are full of shit or both of us are. I remember Peggy’s red dress and my old uniform, and I remember that weird night. We’d just gotten out of Azzano and had a few nights’ leave in London—that would have been winter of ’43. Coincidentally, the first winter I went without once coughing up my lungs. (I was gonna say “without having any near-death experiences” but I realised that’s untrue.) I wanted to dance with Peggy and I wanted to dance with you and I did neither because the twin urges activated some conflicting pathways in my brain and overrode each other. You know, like when you try to go left and right at the same time and end up just tripping over your own feet and looking like an idiot. I was healthy and strong and for the first time in my life, people other than you and my mom were looking at me like I _mattered_ , and I was so overwhelmed. I didn’t know what to do. And at the same time, I felt so invincible, I thought I would have forever to figure it out anyway.

Confession #3: I was gonna kill myself after you fell/I threw you from the train. I was within five minutes of going down with the Valkyrie when Peggy got through to me over comms and talked me out of it. Told me you would have been furious, that it was a waste of the life I’d fought to preserve against all odds from pneumonia and scarlet fever and TB and rogue Nazis. And of course, she was right. So I got out. I lived.

Confession #4: Some part of me never forgave myself for it. 

Confession #5: Some part of me never forgave Peg for it. Not until I found out you were still alive, and that I wouldn’t have been “reunited” with you in the “afterlife” anyway. Quotation marks because these are terms I can’t define, and anyway I’m not sure we aren’t already living our afterlives.

And thank you for the things you wrote about Peggy. She tells me all the time that I’m just being melodramatic as usual, and what did I expect, that we’d live forever and go frolick in the Elysian Fields for the rest of eternity like Achilles and Patroclus? (I’m not kidding, those were the exact words she used.) We’ve been talking about it since the early '70s, when it became clear that I wasn’t just aging well, I wasn’t aging much at all. That she would grow old and die and I’d outlive her. And that’s if she didn’t get herself killed before that. (Trivia question: how many assassination attempts has Peg survived over the course of her career? Answer: even I’ve lost count. Probably more than 30.) For the past few decades, she’s been trying to prep me for that eventuality. These days she’s even encouraging me to go on dates. We’re _married._ I can’t imagine what it must cost her to do that.

And I know what you mean re. oversharing about sad shit. I always end up writing way too much in these letters and wondering if I should just throw them out and start over. Somehow I never do. There isn’t really anyone I could talk to about stuff like this—it’s not that Sam and Nat wouldn’t understand, but that I don’t want them to have to. And again, you don’t have to read all my crap if you don’t wanna. I’ll always read yours though.

Enclosed, as requested:

  * Another bag of jelly beans, this time with all the good flavours.
  * NO more knives, for god’s sake, Buck.
  * Here, have this comic about you vs. capitalism instead. (Spoiler: capitalism wins, because of bizarre candy and gourmet coffee.) I think I got the hair right this time.



Love,

Steve

P.S. Sometimes I wonder if you notice that you call Nat something different every time you refer to her.

 

 

**xii.**

12/12/14 

Stevie, 

I do notice. It’s deliberate. 

Just as deliberate as the five (5) boxes crammed full of stinking durian you left out in the hall, I’m sure. You’ll be glad to know I got my cold, resourceful hands on enough air freshener that I didn’t get thrown out and/or fined by hotel management. Punkass little shit. 

I didn’t do anything weird to you this time, though. Your room is completely free of booby traps. Every piece of furniture you see is harmless and normal. You will not, for any reason, be disturbed by a sudden detonation at 3.22 am tonight. I promise.

And are you kidding? If you’d gone down with the Valkyrie, who would be there to throw themselves bodily between the world and uncertain doom the next time the friendly neighborhood supervillain tried to take it over? Who, for that matter, would be there to thwart _me_ when I needed thwarting? (Peg, I guess. Which would be a great challenge in its own right, but it lacks a certain pathos. And I’m sorry, but in her place I would have given you the exact same talk.)

I believe in afterlives. I believe we both died (figuratively, metaphorically, whatever) and reaped what we’d sowed. Let that say whatever it does about you and me. The fact is that we still exist here, now, today, and we gotta decide what to do with our unexpectedly long lives when throwing them under the auspices of the nearest paramilitary organization doesn’t seem to be an option any more. Brock told me once that, what with advances in medicine and cryofreeze tech and all, I could stay operative for another 400 years if the higher-ups played their cards right. He overheard Alex say so. We thought that was pretty cool, if only in a morbid trainwreck way.

Brock was a decent (if occasionally homicidal) buddy, until you went and dropped a helicarrier on his head.

Point is, 400 years is a lot of time to kill, even if I don’t spend half of it in a freezer. Still thinking about turning pirate. When I got tired of swashbuckling I could retire on an island in the middle of the Pacific, shear sheep and grow corn. Or join a cult. Or make like a vampire and attend high school over and over to the end of my days. 

Nah. Doesn’t involve enough knives.

(I’m fucking with you, Steve. As usual. Brock was a dick and nothing is happening at 3.22 am. I’m an ass.) 

Enclosed:

  * A bowl of what I’m told is called laksa. It’s basically noodles and fishcakes and chicken and chili. All the chili. So much chili.
  * Twelve cupcakes, from a store called Twelve Cupcakes. I spent a long time picking out the ones I thought you’d like. I could be completely wrong, but then again, I did spend the better part of the last century eating junk food with you.



B

P.S. I like the comic but I’m 99.5% sure my head isn’t that big. Have stuck it above the bedside table anyway.

P.P.S. You can write me as much crap as you want. Who’s gonna stop you?

 

 

**xiii.**

Dec 13, 2014 

Buck, 

Come on, durian is awesome once you get over the stench. Admittedly, my initiation into the mysteries of the King of Fruits did come via durian puffs and D24-flavoured ice cream, not five crates of the stuff in my motel hallway, but what’s that thing Howard always used to say? Sometimes you gotta run before you can walk.

And of course I knew there was nothing happening at 3.22. I built my entire post-war career around thwarting you. I know exactly how your two brain cells work.

I’ve been thinking about your second-latest letter a lot. The one about the London bar. I didn’t know you remembered that. Every time I bring up something that happened from Before, or even two missions ago, you give me that patented grimace and say something snappy, like, “Wiped clean, remember?” So I always just kind of assumed you were like a blank slate. _Tabula rasa_ , as the behaviorists say. 

The therapist I went to in the ‘70s was a diehard behaviorist. I told him seeing you gave me nightmares and he said, “Well, then stop seeing him.” The point, you see, is to reduce the incidence of a target behavior, in my case long sleepless nights and flashbacks. Get rid of the antecedent and you get rid of the problem behavior. Perfect logic. Tough love, you might say. Except I’m not sure I want to know how the behaviorists define love. 

I guess what I’m trying to work up to is: what else do you really remember? Since you’re obviously not _tabula rasa_. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.

I’m also really curious about how you’ve been spending your time. My stairwell delinquents, as you call them, inform me that you rarely ever leave your room except to get food and all the crazy stuff you keep giving me. (Please don’t kill them or anything. They don’t know who I am, or for that matter, who you are. I think they just think I’m a really over-concerned relative. Or a groupie. 

Come to think of it, if they ask you if you’re famous, that’s probably why.) 

So I really wonder what you do with all those hours behind your door. I’ve never even known you to stay in a safehouse this long. Me, I’ve been shopping a lot. Yesterday I bought more pairs of skinny jeans than I know what to do with, and today I went to the Bird Park to see if anything there reminded me of Sam. I think maybe tomorrow I’ll go buy souvenirs for the Jameses/Jaimes/Jamies. Would it be cheating if I just got them identical “J” keychains?

I wish you’d come with me. It might be fun, hanging out in a non-life-or-death situation for once. We can go get bubble tea and try all the different toppings.

I miss you, is what I’m saying. I’ve finished all the cupcakes and the laksa. Meals don’t last very long when you eat alone.

Enclosed:

  * Artist’s impression of what you do in your free time. Highlights include spinning knives, sharpening knives, and throwing knives into other knives. (On a related note, these markers you bought for me are really nice, thanks.)
  * A monster of a drink called a “[Milo Dinosaur](https://www.google.com.sg/search?q=milo+dinosaur&espv=2&biw=1366&bih=669&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiVhqznlbDJAhXGto4KHcPyCB4Q_AUIBigB)”. I haven’t actually tried it because I don’t think I’ll survive the experience, even with my enhanced metabolism, but the moment I laid eyes on it I knew you’d love it. 



Write me soon.

Steve

P.S. They’re called chibis. That’s why your head is so big.

 

 

**xiv.**

12/14/14 

Stevie,

I kept one durian for myself and gave the rest to the stairwell delinquents. They’re on my side now, just saying, so watch your step. 

Also, the crates have been gone for two days and I still regret having a nose.

I remember a lot. It’s not that I forget things, it’s that the memories have fucked off somewhere in my head and when I try to retrieve them, it’s like trying to download things with a dial-up connection and Windows XP. Mostly I just get staccato flashes of images and sound, detailed close-ups without the big picture. A lady’s hand on my arm, with slim, pretty bones and vivid scarlet nails. Is that Natalya or some girl I took dancing back in the day? An old man lying on the asphalt, his face grey, his glasses knocked askew. Did I kill him or am I trying to help him? Who even is he? I don’t know.

Like Peggy, things are clearer the further back I go. I remember the way the air tastes in the Swiss Alps. This is something I _don’t_ want to know but I haven’t worked out a way to selectively un-know things yet. I know what it smells like, not just at the bottom of a ravine but at the top of it, cleaning my rifle on a rocky outcrop while we wait for a train to come. We’re bored, and also really wired with adrenaline, which is a strange combination but one we've known all our lives. I tell a story, I think it’s a scary one about the Lincoln ghost train. They brought Lincoln’s body from Washington to Springfield via locomotive in 1865, and his funeral train still runs the same route in April of every year, or so people say. I read about it in a magazine. Railroad workers and ghost hunters gather by the rails at midnight every spring, on the 27 th in Albany, on the 29th in Cleveland, on other days elsewhere, to watch the phantom train pass through with its black crepe hangings and its honour guard of skeletons. They say they can still hear someone playing a dirge as it trundles by.

I always liked stories like that. I tell you so, that night in the Alps. You complain that I’m forever trying to scare you silly, but that it doesn’t work because we aren’t kids anymore, and then you prove it by kissing me.

I may have made that part up. Doubt it, though. Not even I can hallucinate that kind of sloppy ferocity. Wonder if you ever learnt to kiss properly?

Anyway, I can see the constellations behind your head. It’s weird, having to look up at you. I say so. Or maybe I don’t, because I’ve said it a dozen times already and grumbling never made anything better. I look at the sky, because it’s easier than trying to meet your eyes. The stars are particularly bright tonight. There’s a circlet of stars almost directly above us, and when I lie down on my back it seems to align perfectly with your giant fuzzy head. Like a crown. And I think, _thank god, even the cosmos can see it now._

Trains, trains, trains. I wonder if any ghost hunters ever went to the Alps.

I always give you shit about how you pushed me off _our_ train. I remember it in fits and bursts, like a badly produced stop-motion video. I’m falling and falling and your face is receding and your arm is stretched out to me. I try to rewind, but I’m missing a few frames. Did you push me or were you trying to catch me? What difference does it make? None, I guess, except that having you shove me to my icy grave was a terribly convenient way for my handlers to explain that memory to me. One time I said that to Zola’s face and I didn’t see sunlight for a year.

Usually I just try not to think about the train too much. Because when I think about it, I remember the kiss under the stars and how real it was and how someone who kissed like that couldn’t possibly have tried to kill me. That would be like having your throat ripped out by a grinning dolphin.

So, for future reference, I don’t think you pushed me. And if you did, it doesn’t matter. No net gain, no net loss. I’ve shot you more than enough times to make up for it. We ~~are~~ ~~were~~ are enemies. That’s what we do for a living, try to kill each other. This fact exists independently of the fact that you’re my best friend and you mean things to me that I don’t entirely understand, either then or now.

They’re not mutually exclusive. At least not to my two brain cells.

What else do I know? I know for sure I shot you in the thigh once. In Vietnam maybe? I was aiming for your ass, but I missed because you’d just broken my nose with your shield. An ass shot would have hurt less and is almost never lethal. It’s your own damn fault if you nearly bled to death.

Believe it or not, I’ve actually been busy. I’m data-mining the SHIELD files, looking for mentions of me. And by extension, mentions of you. Piecing together a patchwork history for the both of us, trying to get my staccato beats in order. It feels like trying to shoot someone in the middle of a crashing thunderstorm when it’s all dark and you don’t have night-vision goggles, and all you can do is try to spot your mark in the split-second when the lightning flashes. You’ve no idea what happens in between, just what you see in that brief splintering of light.

I’m getting maudlin.

I don’t know if I can meet up with you just yet. Trust me, I want to. Apart from Tash, you’re the only person I actually like spending time with. (Which is ironic because we’ve spent most of our time together fighting to the death.) Can you ask me again in like a week? I just need space to think, I guess. Also a haircut.

In the meantime, check your fridge. I’m enclosing the biggest tub of frozen yogurt I could find.

B

P.S. Hate to say it, pal, but your therapist gave you pretty sound advice. Hunting your serial killer of a best guy is a pretty maladaptive way to spend a century, but you just _had_ to do it.

 

 

**xv.**

12/16/14 

Steve,

Okay, maybe I made things weird. Or maybe that was more food than even you could stomach. 

I think I should add something. I told you once, several letters ago, that we had to figure out what to do with the rest of our lives. What I should have made clear is that I don’t care if we spend that time fighting or fucking or eating our weight in junk food. Any one of those options is fine with me.

I mean, you’re the only one I’ve met who’s actually fun to fight and/or flee from while giggling maniacally.

Anyway, I got that haircut. So yeah. Anytime now. 

Bucky

 

 

**xvi.**

12/16/14 

Addendum to the addendum, Steve, in case it wasn’t clear enough:

Any one of the previously mentioned options is fine, as long as it’s with you. What is _not_ fine is the fact that I haven’t heard back from you and the stairwell people say they haven’t seen you since you delivered your last letter on the 13 th. Did you leave? Did I piss you off?

I was gonna tell you I rented a car. Actually, I was just gonna stick the rental receipt under your door with my letter and let you track me down. More fun that way. I already told you I was gonna try to drive across the world, so I figured you’d know which way to go. I mean, this city is approximately the size of a pea. 

Thing is, I don’t wanna run if you’re not gonna chase me.

So please don’t ignore me. You haven’t even touched the yogurt. I had to eat it myself before it went bad.

Bucky

P.S. Huge-ass thunderstorm. Hope you’re dry and warm.

 

 

**xvii.**

To: Steve Rogers <steeb@avengers.com>  
From: [REDACTED]  
Subject: where are you?  
Time: 16 Dec 2014 10:44 P.M. 

srsly steve it’s not funny. chambermaids say they haven’t seen you in days. your shield is gone but you didn’t even bring your phone wtf

whatever i did i’m sorry, pls come back.

B

 

 

 **xviii.**  

To: Steve Rogers <steeb@avengers.com>  
From: [REDACTED]  
Subject: RE: where are you?  
Time: 17 Dec 2014 12:08 A.M. 

did something happen to peggy?

B

 

 

 **xix.**  

To: Steve Rogers <steeb@avengers.com>  
From: [REDACTED]  
Subject: RE: RE: where are you?  
Time: 17 Dec 2014 06:12 A.M. 

thunderstorm over. weird crop circle-like markings in ground. asked local police and they said they’ve had reports of some giant blond beefcake in a red cape falling out of the sky. some saw him take u back up w/ him. 

so either the norse rapture just happened or the avengers are assembling, whatever.

nothing on the news & social media. no fucking clue what’s happening. pls just reply and let me know ur alive. like even just a blank email will do if you don’t wanna talk to me.

B

 

 

**xx.**

To: Natasha Romanoff <n.a.romanova@avengers.com>; Natalie Rushman <natalie_rushman@starkindustries.com>; Nat <tasha1984@gmail.com>; Therapy Snake <therapysnek@gmail.com>  
From: [REDACTED]  
Subject: WHERE THE FUCK IS STEVE  
Time: 17 Dec 2014 06:13 A.M.

WHERE.

contact me asap. if world is ending, i didn’t end it. can suit up & help.

 

 

**xxi.**

To: Steve Rogers <steeb@avengers.com>  
From: [REDACTED]  
Subject: RE: RE: RE: where are you?  
Time: 17 Dec 2014 06:19 A.M. 

i can’t fucking do this without you

 

 

**xxii.**

To: Steve Rogers <steeb@avengers.com>  
From: [REDACTED]  
Subject: on my way  
Time: 17 Dec 2014 08:01 A.M. 

Nvm. Previous target Fury, N. J. just appeared to me. Not sure if hallucination or am much worse at killing people than previously estimated. Told me about your dumbass nephew/godson/whatever and his dumbass killer robot.

Stole plane. Don’t ask. Headed your way. ETA < 24 hrs.

Pls try not to die. Or at least not until I get there & can go with you.

Also, ignore all previous e-mails. Def not from me.

B

 

 

 **xxiii.**  

12/26/14 

Stevie, 

Just so you know, I hate you.

But also, nice job saving the world from those death robots. Please tell your nephew/godson/whatever to stop inventing stuff already.

You’re probably gonna be drugged up to the gills when you wake up, so I’ll leave this on your bedside table, under your IV drip and the shitton of machines keeping you alive right now because god forbid you exercise some common sense and do that yourself. And no, you weren’t hallucinating; yeah, it was me; yeah, I dismantled three and a half robots with one bullet and I hope to god someone caught that on video because it was fucking awesome.

And if you’re looking for those smelly bouquets people keep leaving beside your bed, I threw them out. I’m not sure if you still get hay fever but I’m not taking any chances. At least the Xmas tree in your ward is plastic.

Enclosed:

  * one (1) sweater, the ugliest that money could buy
  * one (1) vase of fake, pollen-free tulips
  * one (1) box of white chocolates (do you still like those? They are VILE so I bet you do.)



B

 

 

 **xxiv.**  

12/26/14 

SERIOUSLY?

To whom it may concern: Here is your hourly reminder that I, the Winter Soldier, am the only person authorized to kill Rogers, S. G. After I put it off for 70-odd years, I’ll be really fucking pissed if someone else beats me to it.

Enclosed:

  * one (1) dead asshole caught lurking w/ sniper rifle in the ward facing this one



B

 

 

**xxv.**

12/27/14 

Steve. I’m the Fist of HYDRA. How is it I do a better job of keeping you alive than the rest of your team + security put together?

Enclosed:

  * three (3) more dead assholes
  * one (1) heavily concussed archer who, in the heroic process of preventing the above from murdering Captain America in his hospital bed, fell down 3 flights of stairs, landed in a dumpster, and spilled his coffee
  * one (1) new cup of coffee for the above



B

P.S. Hospital authorities: Step up security on this ward asap or I will have to steal the patient.

 

 

 **xxvi.**  

Dec 28, 2014 

Buck,

Please stop leaving dead assholes and other unconscious personnel at the foot of my bed with Post-Its stuck to their faces. It’s very disconcerting.

Sorry I disappeared. I’ll explain more fully when I’m not hooked up to four machines and forcibly prevented from leaving my bed by Romanoff, N. and Wilson, S. EVEN THOUGH I AM PERFECTLY FINE NOW. In the meantime, thanks for the fake flowers and all. Will assume that the volcanic pile of Bucky Bears on the bedside table is from Tony and not you. Here’s a ceramic throwing knife from Nat as a thank-you present for saving Clint’s ass. Take it before the nurses see and DON'T use it on the premises.

Love,

Steve

 

 

 **xxvii.**  

Dec 30, 2014

Buck,

All right, I’m out of the hospital, the robot apocalypse was cancelled, and we’re all firmly esconced in the hopefully-safe embrace of Avengers Tower. Also, yes, my nephew/godson/whatever is grounded until he’s fifty.

Again, I’m really sorry for disappearing on you like that. It’s actually my own damn fault. Tony e-mailed and texted me a few times, saying things like _I fucked up I fucked up please come asap_ only with half a dozen more pop culture references and gratuitous emojis, but I didn’t want to leave you and I figured there was nothing he could do that Rhodes couldn’t clean up. Well, there was. And since I was sitting on the other side of the world with my phone turned off, I didn’t know anything about it until they sent Thor to literally pluck me off the street and fly me to HQ. 

I know, I know. Totally shirking my captainly duties. I _swear_ I would have left a note if I could. As it was, our communications infrastructure had gone sentient and malevolent by the time I figured out what was happening, so I didn’t even get your e-mails. I read them in the hospital, though. I’m so, so sorry you had to go through that. I’ll make it up to you if you let me.

And of course I know it was you. That’s not to say I couldn’t have taken out those three and a half robots alone. I was getting there. I know it looked like I was dangling from the roof of a burning skyscraper at the time, but really, I heard that godawful _wrrrRRRReeeeEEEEEEEEEK_ noise your arm makes when it does the murder thing** and I figured that since you’d finally shown up, I could leave some of the heavy lifting to you. Even though I could have done it myself.

Thanks, Buck. 

I haven’t managed to track down where you’re staying (NOT because I’m still injured or anything like that, but because Sam will not let me step ONE INCH out of Avengers Tower and I’m about five minutes from doing something very dire to him), but I hope it’s someplace safe and warm. I miss Singapore already. I’m headed back there as soon as I’m cleared for travel—I didn’t get to read your last letter before I got flown into action, and I want to see what horrible stuff you’ve put in my fridge since then. I saw you at the car rental place that day and I know you’re still planning to make your crazy cross-planet drive, and I hope you don’t mind too much if I follow you at a discreet distance. Not because I think you’re a threat to anyone, but because seeing you whole and solid and alive reminds me that I’m real, too.

I’m not sure how to get this to you, so I’m just gonna leave it by my bedroom window and trust that you’ll find it somehow. You always do.

I miss you like hell, Buck. It’s been a very long two weeks for reasons that have little to do with the narrowly averted robopocalypse and everything to do with the concepts of distance and space and time and ~~separation~~ ~~being away from y~~ crossing the International Date Line.

In case we don’t get to talk again before the ball drops, happy new year.

Love,

Steve

** Distinct from _zzzzIIIIIIIPPPPP_ (the door-tearing sound) and _gzzzzzzzz_ (the Steve-just-fucked-up-my-servos sound) and _prr! prr! prr!_ (the coffee/junk food alarm). I am putting all these sound effects in the next instalment of my webcomic.

 

**xxviii.**

12/31/14 

Stevie,

Thanks for the detailed auditory analysis of my arm’s functions. Very enlightening. Are you still stuffed full of painkillers?

I’m not sure how you thought I would climb through a window on the 51st storey of one of the most secure buildings in the world, but you were probably overestimating me just a little. Natalya stole your letter for me. We had brunch today (peppermint lattes + choc chip cookies!!!) and it was really nice, just hanging out without a mission. We haven’t done that in a while. And by “a while”, I mean a few decades. She also offered to let me into your suite, but I didn’t think it was a good idea. I always let down my guard around you. I trust you not to kill me (or at least I wouldn’t mind too much if you did, because it’s you), but I don’t know your team just yet. 

So. We’ll meet when you’re ready. You’re right, I did rent a car, though I’m not sure what you mean about following at a discreet distance. Last I checked, cars can seat more than one person. I’m headed back to Singapore tomorrow—gotta pack my things and check that the car hasn’t been towed away or something. I feel like if I skulk around NYC any longer, you’ll get it in your head that you should climb out of bed and come find me and really, Rogers, I can’t condone that at the moment. As nice as it would be to see you face to face.

Plus, it’s really fucking cold.

By the way, I stuffed a few letters under your door in the hotel before I knew you’d gone off to save the world. They are maybe a tiny bit melodramatic. I considered breaking in to steal them back before you read them, but that’d probably piss you off, and since we’re going to be spending a lot of time together in an enclosed space in the months to come, I think I’d better not risk it. So just try to take the stuff I wrote with a grain of salt, okay? Or, like, the entire salt shaker. You always fuck me up. Not in a bad way, though, and I meant every word I wrote. 

It’s a few minutes to midnight. I’m writing this in the café at the bottom of Avengers Tower, waiting for Tasha to come collect this and hand it to you, and I think I’ve figured out which window is yours. I’m smiling up at you and pretending I can see you waving back. Maybe I can. 51 floors, when viewed in perspective, isn’t really all that far.

It’s 2015 now. And I miss you too.

Love,

Bucky

 

 

 

 **xxix. epilogue**  

The car is a nondescript black Toyota, the music pumping from the stereo is Bastille, and the person at the wheel is smiling.

Distance is the product of speed and time. But time is a tricksy little bastard, and speed is immeasurable when Steve’s legs are as wobbly as they were when he first stepped out of Erskine’s capsule. He has given a great deal of thought to this over the last few days, sitting in an endless succession of airport lounges and sprinting from one gate to another to make his connecting flights. New Year’s Eve: fifty-one floors between him and Bucky, curled up sphinxlike and disarmingly small in one of the rickety café chairs, scratching out word after word on lined paper by the light of the fireworks. January first: Steve in the med bay, enduring his final checkup; and Bucky already flying across the world in his stolen plane. If he plots it out on a distance-time graph, the line would spike exponentially. 9,500 flight miles, or 15,323 km.

He can go further back. 1930s Brooklyn: zero displacement. 1943: hundreds and thousands of miles, or the unspeakable distance between the healthy soldier and the 4F. 1945, on the worst day of his life: three inches more than the reach of his arm, and growing fast.

There have been other units of measurement. Missed glances and last chances; gun oil and vibranium; lies and secrets and wary warring ideologies.

But today, the third of January, in the here and now, the distance is four feet of baking pavement and a passenger door already swinging open to greet him. It is three feet and then it is two feet and then he is inside the car and then it is nothing. Ludicrously, Bucky is in shorts and a long-sleeved shirt, sunglasses riding the crown of his head, pale skin at neck and cheek pinking in the violent midday light. His hand glitters on the gearshift. Because people drive on the opposite side of the road here, it’s the metal one, but all the same Steve rests his own hand on it. The fingertips are warm with tropical sun and promise, and much the same could be said of the smile above them.

Zero feet, zero inches; the line on the graph slides home like a triumphant base-runner and Steve fancies he almost hears a cosmic click, like God finally dug up the last jigsaw piece he dropped between his bed and the dresser and snapped it into place, with lightnings and thunderings and choirs of seraphim and all.

He slings his duffel into the backseat. It’s full of letters and art supplies and little else; the shield is safe with Sam, where it belongs in the current century. He won’t need it here. He’s on leave, or he’s unemployed, or he’s retired; he’ll make up his mind later. “You got a map?” 

“Nope,” says Bucky. He draws out the consonants, slow and sly, and dimples wink in his cheeks.

“But you’ve routed it out? Know which roads to take? Or, at least, which countries we want to go through?”

“Nope,” says Bucky again. “What I got is a pair of fake IDs and an ice box full of Cornettos.”

Same old Bucky, after all these years. Steve grins. “Good enough.”

He buckles up and pulls the sunshade down, and Bucky squeezes his hand, and the engine revs as they speed out of the parking lot.

**Author's Note:**

>   * This is the first time I've set a fic in a place I've ever actually lived. I hope y'all enjoyed the occasional hints of (quite literal) local flavour.
>   * I'm [dirtybinary](http://dirtybinary.tumblr.com) on tumblr; come say hi!
>   * And check out my [gay arch-nemeses novel](http://valeaida.tumblr.com/post/149576789996/an-elegy-info-post) maybe?
> 



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